Ethereum Mainnet Activity Surpasses All Layer-2 Networks

Network activity on the Ethereum mainnet has now surpassed that on layer-2 scaling blockchains as gas fees remain low, though it may not all be organic users.

Token Terminal said on Thursday that there has been a “return to mainnet,” with daily active addresses on Ethereum outranking all leading layer-2s.

A recent spike in active addresses closed in on 1 million per day, with Etherscan showing that active addresses surged to around 1.3 million on Jan. 16 but have since settled to around 945,000 daily active addresses.

The figure is higher than all layer-2 blockchains, including the popular networks Arbitrum One, Base Chain and OP Mainnet. The total value secured across all layer-2s currently stands at $45 billion, down 17% over the past 12 months, according to L2Beat. 

Ethereum network activity has surged this month following the Fusaka upgrade in December, which dramatically reduced gas fees. However, it might not all be from genuine users. 

Address poisoning attacks spike

Security researcher Andrey Sergeenkov said on Monday that the spike in network activity could be attributed in part to dusting or address poisoning attacks. 

Address poisoning involves scammers sending small transactions from wallet addresses that resemble legitimate ones, duping users into copying the wrong address when making a transaction.

This has been made viable economically by the slump in network fees, making it cheaper to spam the network. 

Related: Efforts to bulletproof Ethereum are paying off in user metrics

“It’s reasonable to conclude that the recent spike in Ethereum network activity is being materially driven by address poisoning campaigns,” analysts at blockchain security firm Cyvers told Cointelegraph on Wednesday. 

Cyvers’ analysts said that behavioral classification and a statistical correlation “strongly suggest that address poisoning is not a marginal factor, but a significant contributor to the recent rise in Ethereum transaction volume.”

Ethereum still king for asset tokenization

Regardless of the spurious activity, Ethereum “remains the preferred blockchain for on-chain assets,” ARK Invest reported on Wednesday. The assets on Ethereum now exceed $400 billion, and the global market for tokenized assets could surpass $11 trillion by 2030, it added.

Stablecoins make up the bulk of those assets, with Ethereum commanding a 56% share of stablecoins on-chain, and a 66% share of all tokenized real-world assets when layer-2 networks are included, according to RWA.xyz. 

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